The BBC's security team responded to the issue on Saturday and believes it has secured the site. It has not been made clear if the hackers stole data or caused any damage in the attack. Discovery was made when one of the hackers attempted to sell access to cyber criminals on an underground cyber-crime forum, which was being monitored by the cyber-security firm Hold Security LLC.

It is a matter of concern that any server was breached because often a server will store credentials for other servers as a part of an overall system. This appears to be an FTP server, the current use of which has not been disclosed. The BBC remain tight-lipped about the security issues.

This does bother me as it is a prime example. The bigger the organization, the more the temptation for hackers to gain access. One would have thought the BBC would have been well on top of not only their security but also the monitoring of its servers. Today the BBC, tomorrow the cloud service you entrust your personal data to.

I suspect it was mainly down to just showing that it could be done. Part of my reasoning for saying that is because of the general trend and the other part is that if anything valuable had been found then it would have been that which was put on the market and not just the credentials. I could be wrong though.